pouët.net

I gave all my 3 gf4 away, because my old computer couldnt handle then. =)

a_lee_n you are right, but, damn, you have to write soooo much? =)

"There's plenty of sceners that are NOT using nVidia, and there will only be more in the near future" - I'm aware of that, I'm one of them. But still NV has a larger installed base by a far margin. And I neither have the time nor the nerve to do a full compatibility test on democompo entries for breakpoint so I can assure both NV and ATI get their support.

I chose NV for the reasons I already stated above (and on #coders), and I'm not gonna change it for BP2003. Case closed. (And I'm getting tired of it - I had exactly the same useless ranting, bullshitting and senseless arguments before MS2002 because we decided against putting a GF3 into the compomachine, which I believe was the right decision).

just why are all our arguments "useless ranting, bullshitting and senseless", and yours ( i assume) not? I think many people have a valid point here, on both sides of the fence, but an open disussion isn't relly your way of solving things i guess.

I agree with MazyNoc.

It's useless because this is no topic for open discussion in the first place. Replacing the GF4TI with an ATI card wouldn't change anything except the names of the people flaming about preferences, and exactly none of the other suggestions in this thread are applicable in practice. Making a rule that demos should run on atleast 2 different brands can't work, because we don't have the resources for it (neither people nor time nor equipment). And making a rule we can't possibly enforce is hipocrisy, nothing more.

Besides, opposed to what you're saying, the compatibility hell is also there with D3D. There are still enough driver bugs and unclarities in the D3D spec to make coding for other hardware than your own without excessive testing impossible. We can hardly expect every democoder submitting entries to breakpoint to buy another graphics card just so he can be sure his demo won't be disqualified.

accelerated radial blur is sooo cheap ;P
software radial blur is much more interesting, real and nice to my own eyes, no matter the resolution.. ;)

Optimus
P.S. Corilla for ever and put some asm in the corner to feel like so ;ppp

Software 2d effects have died :(((

IT"S A SHAME

I have mood..

..btw, I wish I had oneday sooooo much big money and job, that I wouldn't care of how many hours I would stay on Icafe's ;PPP

I used btw Shift for writting capitals. That's why I accidentally wrote " instead of '
I despise CapsLock and beleive that menus beelong to restaurants ;P

BRING THE CORILLA ON!!!

I dont think the question really was about replacing a gf4ti with a radeon 9700, but rather, are we going to be able to use cutting edge technique (dx9, or for opengl ARB_fragment_program) or not.. feel free to use a geForceFX if you will support new stuff ( they are certainly out in the stores before Breakpoint)

But well, you decide, and you say its a closed subject.. its just a shame that you rather end the conversation ( by calling it ranting) than just stay in the background at listen to all arguments and then maybe make a new decision.

what the HELL are you talking about?

Lol! The irony is that if I had big money, I would be just a king on my home with an ADSL line (But I wouldn't living anyways in Greece if so, which suxx and still living with modem's and ISDN :P) and not needing to go to stinking full of smoke and noice Icafe's ;P But still, I might go to some of them, just for the faqin sake of ;P

MazyNoc:
Well, another question would be then, what you expect from a release which uses latest techs with highest end hw if you will just be able to enjoy it once on the bigscreen at the party...and already know that the majority of sceners out there won't be able to watch your demo/prod after the party anymore as they will _maybe_ upgrade to any ati97 cards by _maybe_ end of the year finally? ;-)

My opinion to that (again): Just do releases that work with the _current_ majority of hw around....and you wil be satisfied the most for yourself then as well! ;-)
Easy as that?

Any properitary hw sucks in gerneral...
But you can't avoid it all the time...see e.g. the DOS-demo era...for technical reasons it had to use GUS in many releases...and today you can't watch those stuff anymore...oh well...it's hard and very sad to see and accept...but the only solution is: try to avoid properitary hw the most you can...and you'll be pretty safe for the coming future! ;-) (as far as we already know about it for today...)

Bye,
Weasel

properitary hw? "full DX9 support" is a standard which will stick around for a very long time, like it or not.. i doubt many features in it will "ever" be dropped from gfx cards

ector:
I meant this 'IN GENERAL'....not talking about dx9 or whatever...
It was pointed on earlier posts when talking about 'nvidia-only' based fx or those things... ;-)

Have I used 'properitary' in combination with dx9 in my post? Nope!! Not at all.... did I?

Bye,
Weasel

ATi R300 OR any other DX9-card... See the difference?
Upgrade to ANY DX9-card and enjoy the demos. That is the message here.
Similar situation to Amiga scene... Some demos require an 060 or a PPC turboboard... But it doesn't matter WHICH board. You're free to choose the brand yourself.



That _current_ majority is rather small, and is getting smaller everyday... I believe nVidia has 60% of the market... And that is in general... I suppose among sceners, there's more ATi-users than in general, because they are more aware of what they buy...
So there's a VERY large minority (at least 40%) that will not be able to watch nVidia-only productions... That's too big a minority to ignore imho.



There was a rather LARGE difference with that situation and the current one. A GUS was was to an SB what a Voodoo was to a Trio64. IE: if you don't have the card, you require software emulation.
The card was a big addition to the system.
But a GF4 is not better than an R300... In fact, it sucks goatdong in comparison.
An R300 can do everything that a GF4 can do, and tons more. And it's faster at it aswell.
So it's completely insane to write demos that work on GF4 but do NOT work on R300. People doing such should be shot. Or at least excluded from competition at parties. I can understand that the organizers at breakpoint won't have enough time... But well... just put an R300 in the compo machine? Any nVidia-only demo will automatically screw up and end up disqualified anyway :)

I'd not put a R300 in the compomachine in any case. The alternative to a GF4 would be Radeon8500 or 9000 (and that's as far above what the average scener has as I'm willing to go).

And I won't do that either unless a majority demands it. So far, neither me personally nor the breakpoint contact address got any requests concerning the compopc specs. I'm not going to screw up the releases of people who actually plan to submit demos to the compo just because lator decided yesterday that the graphics card in our compo machine would make a great pouet bbs topic.

If people contact me who are actually planning to submit a demo to the compo that needs (or runs better with) a Radeon8500, we can talk. So far that hasn't happened, and I doubt it will.

Another thing: Whether the demo runs somewhere else than the compopc is the demomaker's concern, not mine. I personally try to make my demos run on as many machines as possible, but that's my decision, not the party organizers'.

Another thing: I have yet to see a single demo which supports DX8 (!) class hardware to a point that couldn't be done with DX7. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only two memorable GF3+ releases were Orbitalism (simple per pixel bumpmapping which could easily be done with software emulated vertex shaders and the D3DBLEND_DOT3 blend mode) and Raw Confessions (postprocessing effects, also quite doable with software vs and a few render to texture operations).

As sad as it sounds, but the chances that anyone will use PS2.0 more than for convenience over PS1.3/1.4 for his/her bp2003 demo are in my opinion zero. And this (plus the insane fillrate of course) is the ONLY thing a GF4 can't do. VS2.0 are quite fast in software emulation, and my experience shows that hardware versus software VS are never an issue in demos: demoscene engines are either fast enough anyway or slow as hell even on fast CPUs.

Stop whining. If you have a demo for Breakpoint which makes good use of PS/VS2.0 or floating-point framebuffers (and looks really, REALLY ugly on dx8 hardware), send it to me, I'll have a look at it and if it's good, I'll try to convince Ryg to consider a R300/NV30 based card (and be careful, I DO know what can be done with ps1.4 and what can't). If not, simply shut up.

Oh, and stefan: nice try, but we all know you're a dumbass ;)

kb: i happen to know a big swedish group having kickass engine and effects running for last mekka, but someone decided to put old hw in it, so they couldnt release. now who are the dumbass? but sure, you want adrenaline looking demos, i guess i wont even watch the democompo at bp this year :-)

dear stefan,

a) why didn't that certain group contact the organizers then?
b) where is that kickass engine now? it's almost one year since.

Now its no longer so kickass anymore, think theyre gonna release at bp tho.

why would they contact the organizers? you can see in this thread how arrogant the organizers are and well, quite frankly: stupid :-)

From BP site:

"# The competition PC will most probably be an Pentium 4 or Athlon featuring a few GHz, at least 256MB of RAM, a GeForce4 Ti4x00, and a working sound card. We will update this as soon as more details are available."

Cool, that means they can still change the settings according to their own rules, but ofcourse that would make them look like fools, that is how arrogantly they have been in this discussion :-)

"# For Windows demos we will use Windows XP with the latest DirectX and non-beta graphics drivers. We will NOT install any drivers or virtual machines to provide or improve DOS compatibility, don't expect anything more than Mode13h and nosound if you really dare to submit a DOS demo."

Intresting, why dont you run WIN98 i mean, not every scener have an XP compatible machine, i think its kindof wrong forcing everyone to install the latest operating system isnt? , that is thinking in your ideology.

oh no... does that mean NO DXM DEMO FOR BP?

NOOOO! WE'RE DOOMED!

serious inquiries about this topic? Click here.

Ranting of bored adolescents? Please use the textbox below.

bb code suxx0r

i wasnt talking about dxm.